( Tomdispatch.com ) – Donald Trump was the worst president for Black people in the modern era, if not the nation’s history. Given a life of unremitting racial animus, under no circumstances should he receive a single vote from the Black community or other communities of color. After all, he’s never moderated his white nationalist sentiments and count on this: he never will.

Yet, somehow, he has indeed managed to win support from a sliver of the Black community. In 2016, he captured 6% of its vote and that rose to 8% in his losing effort four years later. No, those weren’t the large numbers he claimed he would win, but given who he is and what he’s done his entire life, including during his presidency, far more than he deserved. In 2024, it’s still likely that he’ll only receive single-digit backing, despite earlier polls showing Black support of anywhere from 15%-20% or more, particularly among men.

An early October poll of Black registered voters in battleground states from Howard University’s polling service, the Howard Initiative on Public Opinion (HIPO), exposed Trump’s lie that he’s winning Black voters in large numbers. HIPO (in which I participate) found that 84% of those polled said they planned to vote for Vice President Harris, while only about 8% would vote for Trump, with others undecided or leaning toward a third-party candidate. That’s hardly a great number for the former president, but even a tiny shift toward him or away from Harris might be just enough to give him an Electoral College victory.

Trump has indeed been endorsed by a number of marginalized Black rappers and celebrities. Some were pardoned or given clemency by him, including former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kirkpatrick, rappers Kodak Black and Lil Wayne, and Death Row Records founder Michael “Harry O” Harris and now the political bill has come due. Black members of Congress like Senator Tim Scott and Representative Byron Donalds have also become ubiquitous on Fox News and other stations praising Trump as the second coming of the Lord almighty. Self-interest goes a long way in explaining support from that crowd, but not from those who haven’t been in the spotlight.

How is it possible that a buffoonish bigot who seems to be deteriorating daily has convinced some African Americans he deserves their vote? The trick lies in Trump’s flimflam talents.

He certainly has a knack for diverting attention. His vulgar, ceaseless racist statements and provocations — “shithole countries,” “They’re eating the pets,” and “fine people on both sides” — served the dual purpose of feeding his white base its diet of racial venom and diverting attention from the policies of his administration that caused generational harm to African Americans and other communities of color. And count on one thing: if he returns to the White House, even more racially devastating policies await.

The excuse given by some of his Black (and white) supporters, uncomfortable with his blatant racism, is that he might be crude, temperamental, and a global embarrassment, but his “policies” while in office were distinct positives for the Black community and the country as a whole. Such policy benefits, they assert, should outweigh any reservations about voting for him. In particular, the “Trump economy” is dangled as proof that he should be supported, no matter what.

Unfortunately, much of the media instantly heads for the latest shiny thing dropped by Trump. The more outrageous, the more the coverage steers away from his policies and the devastation they might cause to his behavior and his words. It’s time instead to take an honest look at Trump’s corporate-friendly, white supremacist record while in office as it impacted the Black community.

Trump’s Economy Did Not Do What He Claimed

It bears repeating that Trump took a good economy that he inherited from Barack Obama and ruined it, like so many of his businesses. Obama gave him 75 straight months of job growth. Trump left office as the only president since the Great Depression to depart with negative job growth. Even before the Covid pandemic, which Trump blames for his ineptitude, his job numbers were flailing compared to Biden’s. According to The Hill, “During Trump’s first 31 months in office, employment growth in the United States averaged 176,000 jobs per month. During Biden’s first 31 months in office, employment growth averaged 433,000 jobs per month.”

Trump argues that he had the lowest Black unemployment because, in August 2019, the rate fell to 5.3%, a record at the time. However, he couldn’t identify a single policy or initiative of his that led to that number. When he took office, according to Federal Reserve Bank data, the rate was 7.5% – thank you, Obama! – but as he headed out the door in January 2021, it was 9.9%.

Perhaps the biggest blow to Trump’s boast — and given his disdain for his successor, no doubt to his hyper-inflated ego — is that, in April 2023, after the Biden administration resuscitated the economy following the Trump-driven pandemic catastrophe, the Black unemployment rate fell to 4.8%, the lowest ever recorded.

Trump’s one big economic “achievement” was his 2017 tax cut. Not only was it wildly skewed toward the top 1%, but it also had a negative racial impact. As a New York Times headline announced, “White Americans Gain the Most from Trump’s Tax Cuts,” noting that they were receiving about 80% of the benefits, while African Americans and Latinos got just 5% and 7%. 

Notably, Trump did remarkably little to change the racial income gap, the racial wealth gap, and racial disparities in stocks and investments. Yes, he still sometimes shouts at rallies, “I love Black men,” but he did nothing to close an income inequity gap in which Black men with the same level of education earn only 72% percent of what white men do.

Housing Hell Under Trump

In the area of housing, Trump appointed noted surgeon Ben Carson to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Carson knew nothing about housing policy at any level, nor had he any experience in administering or managing a government agency or department. His scandal-ridden term as secretary included the questionable spending of department funds on furniture and conflict-of-interest problems with his son. Carson was exactly the kind of unqualified hire that he and other conservatives now blame on affirmative action and wokeness.

In terms of policy, one of his first initiatives was a proposal to raise rents on public housing residents. In April 2018, National Public Radio reported that he suggested, “Americans living on housing assistance to put more of their income toward rent and he wants to give public housing authorities the ability to impose work requirements on tenants.” In some instances, under the proposal, many of the poorest renters would have seen an increase to 35% of their gross income, affecting 712,000 renters. Overall, the changes Carson wanted would have impacted more than 4.7 million families.

Trump and Carson also eliminated two anti-discrimination policies put in place at HUD during the Obama Administration to foster fair housing policies and opportunities. The first codified the use of the legal concept of “disparate impact” — looking at racial outcomes rather than the more nebulous idea of racial intent when assessing if racial discrimination has occurred. The second was a rule that obligated local jurisdictions to “identify and dismantle barriers to racial integration.” President Biden reversed those decisions shortly after taking office. 

The racial homeownership divide persisted in the Trump years. By 2021, CNN noted that less than half of Black families, about 44%, owned their homes compared to 72.7% percent, of white families. In fact, in the Trump years, the gap had grown.

Criminal (In)Justice

Trump’s Black supporters ignore his long, racially biased record on criminal justice. They point to the First Step Act, a law sought for years by activists, which Trump signed but played no role in initiating. It provided prison sentence reductions and other needed reforms. After being criticized by both Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence for signing what they considered a “get out of jail free” law, Trump quickly stopped talking about it and there is no mention of the First Step Act on his campaign website where you can buy a “Black Americans for Trump” coffee mug for $25.00.

For the 2024 campaign, he’s returned to form by taking a hard line on criminal justice, while calling for the death penalty for drug traffickers and a return to stop-and-frisk. His fictional “migrant crime” wave is also thoroughly racialized and would, in a second Trump term, undoubtedly lead to sweeps of Black and Brown communities with little regard for due process or human rights.

And remember, under attorney generals Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, the Trump administration carried out policies deeply detrimental to the Black community, including reinstating contracts with private prison corporations, restarting federal executions, allowing police departments to once again obtain military equipment, and supporting “qualified immunity” that protected some particularly discriminatory police behavior.

Trump’s Justice Department also sided with voter suppression initiatives, policies, and laws coming from Republican state legislators and governors, including dropping opposition to a racially discriminatory Texas voter ID law, making it easier to purge voter rolls, and creating the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity that was rightly perceived as an effort to have the Trump White House corruptly get voter information it shouldn’t have had while promoting voter suppression. Even some Republican governors refused to cooperate with that commission.

The Attack on Black Health

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, brought healthcare coverage to millions of Americans after it became law in 2011. It was despised by the far right and Republican leaders who derided it as government socialism. Yet it dramatically reduced the uninsured rate for poor and low-income Americans, including communities of color. According to a 2022 report by the Department of Health and Human Services, the number of uninsured African Americans fell by 40% because of the ACA, declining from 7.1 million in 2011 to about 4.4 million by 2019. Uninsured rates for African Americans remained highest in states that did not extend Medicaid coverage as an available option under the law. The 12 states that failed to do so, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and Wyoming, were all dominated by Republican elected officials.

Buy the Book

Trump was unable to repeal the law — some Republican legislators and their constituents loved parts of the ACA — and so he tried to undermine it in other ways. As the Washington Post reported, he slashed “federal money for advertising, community outreach, and ‘navigators’ who serve as enrollment coaches.” If left to Trump, millions of African Americans and others would have had zero coverage and have been left to suffer the harshest consequences of an unaffordable healthcare system.

Worse yet, Trump’s Covid response was a masterclass in what not to do. In the early days of the pandemic, he willingly and knowingly let hundreds of thousands of people die, a significant percentage of whom were Black and Latino, for his own selfish political interests. By the time Trump left office, more than 70,000 African Americans had died from Covid, a rate 1.8 times that of white Americans.

Environmental Injustice

Like other far-right conservatives, Trump denied the very existence of human-driven climate change and did all he could to weaken and undermine environmental regulations. His agenda included removing or reducing protections against air and water pollutants and other dangerous environmental toxins. No president in memory was as harmful or neglectful when it came to protecting the nation, environmentally speaking.

For example, as the Center for American Progress reported, he “gutted protections for clean water by weakening the Clean Water Act” and the Safe Drinking Water Act. As a result, “communities of color in particular are seeing slow and inadequate enforcement” leading to greater harm and risk.

African Americans and other communities of color are far more likely than whites to be located in areas disproportionately impacted by Trump’s repeal of the Clean Power Plan and his degrading of Mercury and Air Toxic Standards. The need for enforcement and protection is clear as Black Americans are “75 percent more likely to live in close proximity to an oil or gas facility than people of other races” and are “nearly 40 percent of those who live within three miles of a coal power plant” along with other communities of color.

Trump also wanted to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice, which had been created specifically to address the needs of communities of color related to uneven harm from climate change and corporate pollution. Failing in that effort, he unsuccessfully tried to cut its funding significantly in his last years in office.

Education

Trump falsely claims that he “saved historically Black Colleges and Universities” (HBCUs) because he signed legislation extending the years in which Congress would provide funding for them and other minority-serving institutions. Despite his statements to the contrary, his FUTURE Act provided more or less the same level of yearly funding as during Obama’s presidency, roughly $80 million to $85 million (out of a possible $255 million under the law). And that would prove a pittance compared to the Biden-Harris investment of at least $7 billion aimed at HBCUs. It should be noted that Harris graduated from Howard University, one of the nation’s oldest HBCUs. Trump appears to have only been on an HBCU campus once in his life, a visit to Benedict College in 2019 when students were told to stay in their dorms while he gave a talk to a handpicked, bused-in audience.

Otherwise, Trump generally attacked Black educational needs — from proposed cuts at the Department of Education to proposed orders to eliminate any funding for programs related to educational diversity and inclusion to his appointment of Supreme Court Justices who would vote to erase more than 50 years of racial progress by eliminating affirmative action in higher education.

Civil Rights

On September 4, 2020, only months before leaving office, Trump ordered the White House Office of Management and Budget to issue a memorandum that directed federal agencies “to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda” that might suggest the United States is a racist country. The goal was to cut funding and cancel contracts related to programs or training supposedly employing such concepts.

That attack would have eliminated every program that sought to address the nation’s history of racial discrimination and exclusion. While president, Trump stated (and recently reiterated) that “we will terminate every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across the entire federal government.”

Trump Appointments

Trump’s judicial and other appointments while in power mirrored the tone and hue of his businesses: lily white. He had one of the worst records in terms of selecting judges of color at the federal level, including the Supreme Court. At the appellate level, Trump only did better than Ronald Reagan in the modern era. Reagan appointed seven Black judges, while the Trump administration could only find nine, unlike the administrations of Jimmy Carter (37), George H.W. Bush (11), Bill Clinton (61), George W. Bush (24), and Barack Obama (58). Overall, about 16% of Trump’s judges were people of color.

In terms of the Supreme Court, Trump had three appointments and chose folks who looked like him, two white men and one white woman. It’s rare indeed that any president gets three appointments, let alone in a single administration, but Trump did, due to the machinations of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. In short, a minority-elected president and a minority-elected GOP Senate majority claimed three Supreme Court seats and locked in a conservative majority on the court for a generation. 

Black Lives Didn’t Matter

From Election Day, November 3, 2020, until January 6, 2021, Donald Trump spent every breathing moment trying to disqualify millions of Black votes from Atlanta, Detroit, Madison, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Now, he and his Black representatives have the stunning audacity to want those same voters to cast a ballot for him. Consider it a classic lie, a con, a grift. As my grandmother would have said, Trump is trying to sell ice cubes in the desert.

He never has and never will have the Black community’s interests at heart. He counts on lies, misrepresentations, and the hope that folks will forget his disastrous presidency. His rhetoric while in and out of office has been hateful and filled with racist dog whistles and blaring horns. But it’s not just his words that need to be criticized. His past policies and projected ones are a stew of far-right extremism, autocratic and bigoted, that will only send the nation backward into a hell on earth if he’s returned to office.

Don’t be bamboozled. The racism and authoritarianism that were infants in his first term will emerge as full-blown adults in a second one. His pledge of retribution and empowerment of the most extreme elements of his base will generate endless crises, chaos, and generational harm to communities of color.

The task on November 5th is simple. Hold accountable for his misdeeds, deceptions, racist sneering, and autocratic aims, the man whose former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said he was “fascist to the core,” whose former White House chief of staff called him “an authoritarian” who “admires people who are dictators,” and whose former press secretary said, “He has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth.”

Copyright 2024 Clarence Lusane

Via Tomdispatch.com

Alex Galbraith at Salon reports that disgraced former New York mayor, Rudi Giuliani, went out of his way to bash Palestinians. Giuliani has been ordered to turn over most of his wealth to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, African-American election workers whom he defamed with hate speech and false allegations. He has been disbarred for his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

Giuliani alleged that Hamas trains Palestinian toddlers at two years old to hate Americans: “The Palestinians are taught to kill us at two-years old.”

In his fact-free universe, he alleged that Kamala Harris is attempting to bring Palestinian refugees to the US, saying, “She wants to bring them to you.” He added, “They may have good people. I’m sorry I don’t take a risk with people who are taught to kill Americans at two.”

Since Giuliani’s own children are embarrassed by his descent into whatever that is, he may not be much in touch with them or remember much about them. But my recollection is that when you tell two-year-olds to do something, they typically reply “No!” Actually I think that is their standard response to most assertions, though they will say “yes” if you ask them if they want to go to a toy store or go see a cartoon at the movies.

I actually know something about Palestinians and their history. See my new book, Gaza Yet Stands.

Let’s just recall who Giuliani is talking about when he talks about Palestinians in America, who are listed at Wikipedia. John H. Sununu, who served both as governor of New Hampshire (1983–89) and as George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff in the White House, had a Greek-Palestinian ancestor from Jerusalem. His son, John E. Sununu, served as a senator for New Hampshire. The Sununus are Republicans.

Gibran Hamdan played in the NFL for the Washington Redskins. Tarek Saleh also played in the NFL for the Cleveland Browns.

We have Hashem El Serag, a renowned medical researcher on liver cancer who chairs the Medicine Department at Baylor University. I don’t know about you, but I want Dr. El Serag here and working on treatments for liver cancer and other diseases. He’s a million times more useful to America than a scoundrel like Giuliani.

Then there is retired Col. Peter Mansoor, a professor of history at the Ohio State University, who served in Iraq and was part of General David Petraeus’s brain trust there. He is half Palestinian.

Justin Amash represented Michigan’s Third Congressional District from 2011 to 2021. Amash was a Republican but became a Libertarian to protest Trumpism. That is, this Palestinian American is a more loyal and patriotic American than Giuliani can ever dream of being.

Or DJ Khaled, who responded to Trump’s visa ban and wall-building this way, “Bless up 🙏 I am a Muslim American love is the 🔑 love is the answer. It’s so amazing to see so many people come together in love ! I pray for everyone I pray we all love and live in peace .. #NoBanNoWall 🙏.”

DJ Khaled once took his family on a trip across America, visiting numerous cities, out of love for his country. He raps peace and love, and said that the lack of love in Trump is what repelled him.

DJ Khaled, “God Did”

Then we have Dean Obeidallah, an actually funny American comedian and savvy political commentator whose father hailed from the British Mandate of Palestine.

Or take Bella Hadid, the Palestinian-American supermodel who loves America so much that she moved to Texas and adopted a cowboy lifestyle.

Or her sister Gigi, also a supermodel, and an activist in encouraging voting. Tommy Hilfiger went so far as to suggest that Gigi Hadid could help create a love between the US and the Middle East.

While you wouldn’t want to underestimate the influence of a dynamic supermodel, that hope may be unrealistic. Still, no one thinks Rudi Giuliani has the potential to create peace between anyone and anyone else. It is Gigi Hadid who is the real American, Palestinian heritage and all.

Some are revising these policies to include swift consequences for those who dare to follow what have been student protest norms for decades. Similar threats loom for university staff and faculty – not only those who protest, but even some who simply speak out. 

Such policies will ultimately hamper universities from accessing a path towards their own goals of diversity and inclusion. 

In recent months, I visited more than half a dozen pro-Palestinian college encampments in North America, from the US Midwest, to the West Coast, to Canada. As an anthropologist, I was interested to observe that each called itself the “liberated zone”. 

At one encampment, I heard a participant laugh at the notion of university policies on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), saying: “It should be DIE, not DEI. They’re using it to justify killing us.” 

The camper articulated a common frustration regarding the increasingly performative function of DEI initiatives on college campuses across the country. What does this term mean without liberation?

Protesters themselves seem to be doing a better job of upholding such ideals. At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, during the Jewish holiday of Passover, campers held a Seder meal and welcomed everyone at the encampment to join in the celebrations. 

They did not interfere with a group of opposing protesters who gathered nearby, holding pro-Israel signs. It struck me that even in the context of allowing space for peaceful dissent and opposition, the encampment was liberated. 

‘We keep us safe’

From what I observed, these protest encampments aim to live by the ideals they are protesting for: freedom and justice for all, without the racially and economically infused hierarchies that dominate the world. 

At the University of California, Los Angeles, which was attacked by external Zionist agitators, campers protected each other while police stood by. The officers did not intervene, and the campers did not call on them. “We keep us safe,” campers chanted.

The morning the Ann Arbor encampment was raided and forcibly dismantled, Muslims had just completed the Fajr prayer and an interdenominational Christian worship service was in progress when officers moved in.

Several encampments I visited also observed Indigenous rituals, including a Cree tobacco ceremony – exactly the type of event one imagines taking place on a college campus. During meals, campers made an effort to include kosher, halal, vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options.

Being in a community together is the healthiest way for students to learn about, and from, each other, without objectifying or essentialising norms that might be unfamiliar to some. 

The encampments also featured diverse activities, from film screenings, to holiday celebrations, to topic teach-ins with expert guest speakers. One professor who lived more than an hour away from the encampment he was visiting told me: “I will drive down here if the students host an organising workshop. What they’re coordinating here is unbelievable.” 

Such sentiments were shared with me by many others from coast to coast. 

“Protest,” Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Endless cycle

After I was hired in 2017 in the first cohort of a fellowship that was a part of my university’s five-year DEI 1.0 plan (we are now on DEI 2.0), I asked a school official who was guiding the project to explain the use of the term “inclusion”.

What does it mean, I asked, for the institution to pursue inclusion, when this very concept entails a hierarchy, ie, one superior group gets to be the “includer”, while another inferior group is excluded until the former allows them in?

To his credit, he did not articulate a defence of this term, suggesting instead that we view it as a “placeholder”.

The administrations have aligned themselves with far-right interests, at the expense of the very cause of inclusion for which they’re supposedly fighting

Still, the concept itself remains a pursuit. Like past efforts to foster “multiculturalism” and “tolerance”, it seems that liberal-left initiatives to address histories of marginalisation and racism just can’t quite get it right. Higher education institutions have become the epicentre of both the responses to address these historic struggles for equality, and the critiques of these responses – an endless cycle. 

For years, I have studied how diversity’s self-contradictory reality in higher education institutions can lead to self-exclusion. Some campuses have grappled with this by substituting other words for the standard DEI label. New York’s Cornell University whittled their office name down to “Belonging at Cornell”.

What I didn’t predict when I began this journey more than a decade ago was the accompanying attack on DEI at universities and beyond by the far right, leading some states to restrict funding for DEI work at public colleges. 

Thinking about it more deeply, this move shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. DEI work is centred on identity politics, and for obvious reasons, it doesn’t make space for identities that are not marginalised, which has spurred some to revolt. 

This situation also puts critical progressives in a corner: do they continue to critique DEI, or pivot to defend it from right-wing attacks as the primary vehicle in higher education aiming to address histories of systemic bias and discrimination?

Valuable lesson

Amid this backdrop, I have been stunned by the response of most higher education institutions to the encampments on their campuses. 

Colleges are imagined to be sites of free speech and expression, intellectual inquiry, and encountering differences. For many, they form a bridge towards independence as adults. Most colleges have spent the better part of the new millennium ramping up their investments in DEI work.

But today, at a moment when students have united to erect encampments that have organically achieved – even amid their internal disagreements – pluralistic communities that welcome people from myriad backgrounds, universities are not embracing them, but rather treating them as a threat. 

Instead of joining the encampment communities and trying to learn from their students about how to foster a culture of liberation, most university administrations have at best kept them at arm’s length, or worse, violently dismantled them. Thus, the administrations have aligned themselves with far-right interests, at the expense of the very cause of inclusion for which they’re supposedly fighting.

Rather than continuing to target students and tear down encampments, university administrations should go out and witness liberation in action. Perhaps then it could dawn on them that to centre DEI without centring liberation is a futile endeavour, resulting in DEI initiatives being viewed as performative by the very communities they claim to serve.

Liberation should not be complicated. It is most definitely possible on university campuses and around the world, if people believe in it rather than fearing it. The student encampments, at the very least, have taught us that.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Reprinted from the Middle East Eye with the author’s permission.

Rupture and Repair is published in pdf format here. Below I excerpt a couple of pages in html with the permission of the authors.

This report details a substantial rupture of trust between students, staff, and faculty in the Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian (MAP) communities and Stanford in academic year 2023-24. These communities have felt afraid for their safety, unseen and unheard by university leadership, and silenced through a variety of formal and informal means when they assert the rights and humanity

of Palestinians. This rupture has been compounded by a longer history of Islamophobia, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian sentiment that stretches through and beyond Stanford.

In spring 2024, the question of Palestine remains one of the most pressing political issues of the day, both in our university and on the global stage. A core mission of Stanford is to “educate tomorrow’s global citizens” by enabling students to “engage with big ideas, to cross conceptual and disciplinary boundaries, and to become global citizens who embrace diversity of thought and experience.” This past year, numerous Stanford staff, faculty, and administrators have devoted significant time and effort to honoring these values despite extraordinary scrutiny from Congress, national media, alumni, and others.

Yet the findings of this committee indicate that Stanford has not lived up to this mission. The university has undermined speech, teaching, and research on Palestine. For Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian community members, Stanford’s decisions have diminished their sense of equality, inclusion, and belonging on campus. These decisions have also sent a message to the whole university that Palestine is an exception to Stanford’s stated mission: a topic that one cannot study, discuss, or teach without potentially damaging one’s future.

In this report, we detail, based on hundreds of hours of listening sessions
with students, staff, faculty, and alumni, the challenges of being a member
of Muslim, Arab, and/or Palestinian communities at Stanford. In many cases, these challenges extend to students, staff, and faculty of any identity who align themselves with or engage the rights of Palestinians. We show how these challenges are linked to persistent suppression of speech on Palestine; underrepresentation of community members in conversations that matter; a scarcity of scholarly expertise in Palestinian and Arab studies; and institutional discomfort with the diversity of opinion and expertise that does exist on campus.

The report makes the following core findings:
Students from MAP communities experienced dozens of incidents that undermined their sense of safety and belonging, including physical assaults, threats, and harassment. Although Stanford responded appropriately to some of these incidents and provided security in response to student requests, on many occasions students felt that the institutional response was insufficient given the severity and persistence of incidents . . .

Read the whole thing.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Consider Donald Trump to be in a racial bind when it comes to election 2024. After all, he needs Black voters to at least defect from Joe Biden in swing states, if not actually vote for him. Yet, more than ever, he also needs his white nationalist base to believe that a second Trump term will be even more racist than the first and he’s been openly claiming that he’ll address the ghost of anti-white racism. Not surprisingly, his evolving strategy for the Black vote has been high on empty symbolism and viral moments, but distinctly low on specific promised policy benefits for the Black community.

Milkshakes and far-right policies are all the presumptive Republican presidential candidate has recently offered Blacks. Take his orchestrated photo op at a Chick-fil-A in Atlanta a preview of things to come. The event was organized by Black MAGA supporter and Republican operative Michaelah Montgomery, who recruited some young African Americans, probably students from nearby historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), to cheer for Trump when he entered the place. He proceeded to buy milkshakes for everyone. Montgomery herself gave Trump a picture-perfect hug and, to the glee of MAGAworld, stated, “I don’t care what the media tells you, Mr. Trump. We support you.”

Naturally, while there he made false claims about what he had done for Black folks while president. It wasn’t quite a speech, but he more or less mumbled that he had great support in the area because “I have done more for the people of Atlanta than any other president by far. I have done more for the black community than any other president since Abraham Lincoln and maybe including Abraham Lincoln, but since Abraham Lincoln. And it looks like our polling is very good in the state of Georgia overall. We are very happy about it. We have had — you see the support. It’s been really something.”

Note to Trump: You had such great support in Georgia in 2021 that the GOP lost two Senate seats in run-off elections there (while you were trying to overthrow the government). And that was primarily because of the turnout of Black voters who, the previous November, had voted for President Biden and returned to vote Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock into office.

Without actually engaging the students at Chick-fil-A, and speaking in his usual broken fashion, Trump boasted: “That’s really nice. We took care of the — black colleges, university. They are taken care of. Biden did nothing for them. I did everything.”

Note to Trump: The Fostering Undergraduate Talent by Unlocking Resources for Education Act (or FUTURE Act) you signed ensured that permanent funding for HBCUs would remain at essentially the same level as during the Obama administration (about $85 million). The Biden administration, on the other hand, has invested over $7 billion in HBCUs. That includes “$3.6 billion for HBCUs through the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief,” “$1.6 billion in capital finance debt relief for 45 public and private HBCUs,” and “$1.7 billion in grant funding to expand academic capacity and provide support for low-income students.”

MAGA and HBCUs

Michaelah Montgomery is steeped in contemporary MAGA politics. She has ties to the Blexit Foundation, a group started by far-right provocateur and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens to sway African Americans from the Democratic Party. Montgomery states on her LinkedIn page that she was Blexit’s city director for the Atlanta metro region. She is also the founder of Conserve the Culture, a group apparently devoted to converting young African American students to conservative, that is, Trumpublican, politics.

In interviews with the right-wing media, she made it appear that Trump had encountered a group of everyday young Black people at that Chick-fil-A who spontaneously expressed their love for him. In fact, it was a handpicked group that did not represent most HBCU students or the Black community more generally.

Buy the Book

If she really thought Trump had developed significant popularity among Black students, why didn’t she schedule him to speak at an HBCU? Montgomery later said: “The media will definitely have you thinking that if [Trump] were to show up to our neighborhood… that an angry mob of some sort would form or a riot would ensue.” She can pretend otherwise, but if Donald (“the Black people like me”) Trump actually ever showed up to spew his usual lies to any HBCU audience or Black community in the nation, there would indeed be massive protests.

While he claims he’s had great relations with HBCU presidents, he only visited one of those schools during his presidency and it turned into a scandalous Trumpian event. In 2019, he gave a talk at Benedict College in South Carolina to crow about his criminal justice reform policies. However, Benedict students were asked to stay in their dorms, where they were essentially imprisoned for an hour and served lunch while Trump bloviated. The faculty, too, were requested to stay away. According to USA Today, only seven students were allowed to attend the event and they were not allowed to ask questions.

Black and Far Right

Trump’s Black supporters continue to propagate the false notion that he’s going to make a historic breakthrough in voter support in the coming election. Polls are one thing, election results another. While his campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were wish-casting that he would get 15% to 20% of the Black vote, he only won 6% and 8% respectively.

And it should be noted that Trump desperately wants to dump Black votes not cast for him. The Big Lie that he won in 2020 was premised on his contention that voting in Black-dominated cities was corrupt and that millions of votes should have been discounted. Accepting that “reality” is the price of admission to Trumpworld, whether at the Trump-colonialized Republican National Committee or for any prospective vice-presidential candidate.

And worse yet, his African American sycophants continue to drink the Kool-Aid. South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott humiliated himself recently on NBC’s Meet the Press when he clumsily refused six (yes, six!) times to state that he would accept a Trump defeat in the fall. Repeatedly asked, he demonstrated that his desire to stay in Trump’s good graces and potentially become his running mate took priority over the most basic stance for maintaining a constitutional democracy.

In the service of Trump, Scott also launched a video series, “America’s Starting Five,” a weekly discussion between him and the other four Black Republicans in Congress, Representatives Burgess Owens (UT), John James (MI), Wesley Hunt (TX), and Byron Donalds (FL). The goal: to convince Black voters that the GOP and Trump are the only way to go if African Americans want to get ahead.

The first episode, however, didn’t focus on policy differences between the Democrats and Trump, but on two ill-advised and well-criticized statements by Joe Biden. In 2019, he said that “poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids,” implying it was a given that white kids were bright and talented. He immediately recognized his mistake and tried to clean it up with gibberish. (“Wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids, no, I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”) In 2020, as he was finishing an interview with the popular Black radio host Charlamagne tha God, Biden said, “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” At the time, criticism flowed from across the political spectrum in the Black community, chastising the president for seemingly attempting to police Black racial identity.

Scott and the others used those statements to draw a conclusion about Biden’s bigotry and then extend that critique to the Democratic Party. This required, of course, burying decades of Trump’s racist statements and behavior in a memory hole that went deep into the center of the earth. It was an act of epic historical revisionism. They functionally erased the fact that he gave succor to white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, attacked voting rights, expressed a desire to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters, demanded that there be less immigrants from “shithole” nations and more from Norway, defamed black prosecutors, judges, and district attorneys with racist verbal attacks, insulted Harriet Tubman, and so much more during his presidency.

The Racial Storm Is Coming

Yet consider Trump’s first term nothing but an appetizer, should he be reelected. According to his campaign website, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and Project 47, he will unleash a program of racial authoritarianism unseen since the worst days of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. And he’ll be emboldened and enabled by a constitution filled with ambiguities and undemocratic provisions, by an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court he helped appoint, and by millions of his supporters (many of whom have shown a propensity for using violence to meet their idea of his agenda).

Trump’s second-term racial program is already emerging. He stated while president and recently reiterated that “we will terminate every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across the entire federal government” and end Biden’s “Marxist executive order that seeks to impose racist and woke sexual ideology across the federal government.”

Believe him.

And it won’t just stop at the federal level or in the public sector. As the Guardian recently reported, MAGA forces are planning to go after all efforts at inclusion (whether related to racial, gender, religious, or sexual-orientation), including in the corporate sector and the non-profit world. Trump’s former adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal group and other far-right actors have already filed suits against Fearless Fund, a venture capital business founded by Black women; Hello Alice, which provides grants to small Black business owners; and the George Floyd Memorial scholarship program at Minneapolis’s North Central University, among other initiatives. America First Legal has been on a hyper mission to end diversity efforts, all of which it perceives as harmful to white Americans.

In a broader context, Trump has stated, “But if you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white and that’s a problem.” First and foremost, Trump sees himself as a victim of racism by Black public authorities and has been signaling that he’s all in on a campaign of overt white nationalism. It couldn’t be clearer where he’ll focus the resources of the White House and federal government should he return to power.

And one thing is guaranteed: he’ll have support for his actions. As USA Today noted, citing a CBS November poll, “Most white voters supporting Trump believe that racial minorities are favored over white people.” About 58% of Trump voters (as opposed to 9% of Biden ones) believe “racial minorities” are favored over “white people.”

And his plans (as well as those of his GOP allies) to get back into office include not only voter suppression tactics like closing polling sites, ending early voting, and questioning mail-in or drop-box ballots, but attempting to employ an army of Election Day militias who will look for “irregularities” and “illegal” behavior. Is there any doubt where those 100,000 election watchers will be sent (or what they will look like)? And by the way, there has been stone-dead silence from Trump’s Black supporters on the plan to send hardcore MAGA troops to Black and Latino communities in swing states.

Absurd to the End

Trump has said to his Black backers, “I’m being indicted for you, the Black population.” That’s his way of attempting to link his own misconduct and corruption to his conviction that the Black community is overwhelmingly filled with criminals. Even worse, he has insultingly compared himself to South African leader Nelson Mandela, one of the most famous prisoners in the world for nearly three decades. Of course, he knows absolutely nothing about Mandela or what sent him to prison, only that he was famous for it. Mandela became a global hero to tens of millions who fought for years for his freedom.

You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, according to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, The Donald had a remarkably low opinion of Mandela. Cohen wrote in Disloyal: A Memoir that, after Mandela died in 2013, Trump told him, “Mandela f—ed the whole country up. Now it’s a s—hole. F— Mandela. He was no leader.”

Of course, Trump knew little and could have cared less about Africa, or South Africa in particular. There is almost no record of him discussing or tweeting about South Africa. The one time he did, based on a news report by far-right commentator Tucker Carlson, he tweeted a white supremacist talking point, falsely claiming that there were “large-scale killings” of white farmers in that country. From former Klan leader David Duke to hard racist websites like the Daily Stormer, white supremacists naturally celebrated Trump’s tweet.

In 2016, every white nationalist and supremacist in this country supported Donald Trump. In 2020-2021, in the wake of the Charlottesville riots, immigration cruelties, and the January 6th insurrection, they supported him again. And now, as the 2024 election looms, and Trump fights “anti-white” racism, he has once more earned their love and their votes.

Singer and activist John Legend who, along with his wife Chrissy Teigen, has battled Trump for years, summed up the former president best. He said: “He’s done very little for us and he is at his core, truly, truly a racist.”

Welcome to the 2024 election season and a world in which Black MAGA is still MAGA to the core.

Copyright 2024 Clarence Lusane

Tomdispatch.com

( Michigan Advance ) – Without equitable data systems, governmental policies will always come up short of fairly representing all of the people they are intended to serve. 

It is with that in mind that we at the Michigan League for Public Policy and many of our partners have long advocated for the inclusion of racial and ethnic groups that are currently left out of data collection, including, but not limited to individuals with origins in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The MENA region includes several countries, such as Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria and Yemen; many Arabic-speaking and non-Arabic speaking groups, as well as ethnic and transnational groups.

For far too long, MENA has been excluded as a separate race category in federal data collection — such as the decennial census — here in the United States, but is instead collapsed into the white or “other” categories. This means no federal agency has established an understanding of MENA Americans or their lived experiences. It also means the MENA-American experience has been systemically unaccounted for in federal data and has, therefore, long been excluded from the design and implementation of policies and programs intended to address civil rights and racial equity. 

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

This has had significant impacts on many aspects of the lives of MENA Americans and masked many pressing social concerns, like barriers to quality healthcare, limited opportunities for success among MENA small business owners and entrepreneurs, and a lack of understanding by federal agencies regarding health disparities, child well-being, and other social and economic disparities in MENA communities. 

Having complete, disaggregated federal data that provides more visibility for MENA Americans is especially important here in the Great Lakes State, as the state’s population becomes more diverse and the MENA population rapidly grows. 

In fact, Michigan has the second-largest MENA population in the U.S. at 310,087, second only to California, according to data collected through a new write-in option under the white category in the 2020 Census that specifically solicited MENA responses. 

While this data is valuable, it’s incomplete and does not provide a full, accurate and reliable picture of the MENA population. And, the decennial census write-in option continues to fail to recognize that many of the people in MENA communities do not identify as white and have very different lived experiences from white people with European ancestry. 

The good news is that we may soon see MENA added as a minimum reporting category in federal data collection thanks to one of several recently proposed, important updates to Statistical Policy Directive (SPD) 15. SPD 15 was developed in 1977 in order to collect and provide consistent, aggregated data on race and ethnicity in every area of our federal government, including the decennial census, administrative forms and household surveys. It serves as a crucial element in the oversight and administration of policies and programs that address racial and ethnic disparities and, yet, since its development, it has only undergone one update — in 1997. 

Recognizing the need to keep up with population changes and the evolving needs and uses for the federal data collected, a work group was established in 2022 to develop several new, proposed updates to SPD 15. And early last year during the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) public comment period on the initial proposed updates, we at the League were proud to formally voice our support for the proposal to add MENA as a new minimum reporting category.

The League also made sure to include a policy recommendation in the 2023 Kids Count in Michigan Data Book calling for investment in more robust and equitable data systems — specifically pointing to the lack of a MENA reporting category in the U.S. Census.

By ensuring that MENA Americans are included in federal data collection moving forward, we can ensure that they receive the representation, resources and programmatic support they need to thrive, support their families and make a stronger impact in their local communities. Changes to our current data systems are long overdue and must be made in order to lift up and address the needs of racial and ethnic groups that have been long overlooked. 

We at the League are continuing to follow the status of the proposed SPD 15 updates closely and are hoping to see the OMB make changes — including the addition of the MENA reporting category — this year. Community members are welcome to follow the League’s website and social media for updates on this issue as they become available. 

 

Simon Marshall-Shah

Simon Marshall-Shah is a state policy fellow at the Michigan League for Public Policy. He previously worked in Washington, D.C,. at the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP), providing federal policy and advocacy support to nonprofit, Medicaid health plans (Safety Net Health Plans) related to the ACA Marketplaces.

 

 

 

Michigan Advance

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Joe Biden won the 2024 Michigan Democratic primary, but “uncommitted” ran a spirited campaign.

More than 100,000 Michiganders voted “uncommitted” in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, 13% of the Democratic electorate.

Listen to Michigan organized the uncommitted campaign in Michigan, promoting it as a way to express dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s public stance in support of Israel’s actions in its conflict with Hamas in Gaza.

The group also set a goal of securing more uncommitted votes than the 11,000-vote margin by which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. The total was nearly 10 times that number.

Biden won Michigan in 2020 by 154,181 votes.

While there were no exit polls conducted with Michigan primary voters, preelection polling just before the primary showed Biden’s weakness among potential young voters as well as Arab Americans.

The Young Turks Video added by IC: ” Arab-Americans FED UP With Biden Vote ‘Uncommitted’ #TYT

Michigan has the largest Arab, Muslim and Palestinian population in the United States, currently numbering more than 200,000.

More than half of the population of Dearborn, Michigan, is Arab, as is its mayor; it is home to the largest mosque in the United States. One of the leaders of the uncommitted movement is U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib from the 12th District, the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress.

At time of publication, with 98% of precincts reporting a day after the election, vote tallies from Dearborn, the city with the highest percentage of Arab American voters in the state, show “uncommitted” leading there – 6,290 votes to President Biden’s 4,517.

It’s not clear that all of the uncommitted voters were part of the protest. In primaries, some voters will vote uncommitted if they have not yet made their choice or don’t want to disclose that choice for any number of reasons. In 2020, 19,106 Democratic voters in Michigan selected uncommitted, while 21,601 did so in 2016 – even though no protest was attached to those decisions.

What makes the 2024 primaries different from previous contests is that uncommitted voters are being reported in exit polls and by election officials because that designation actually appears on the ballot in some states.

Besides Michigan, which added uncommitted to its primary ballots in 2012, there are uncommitted lines on the ballots in New Hampshire, North Carolina and South Carolina; Florida has a “no preference” line. In Oregon and Washington, citizens will be able to vote for an uncommitted delegate to the convention.

Selecting uncommitted is a way for voters to express dissatisfaction with the candidates whose names appear on the ballot while still participating in the democratic act of voting.

In my view, this form of peaceful protest is an essential element of American democracy and more demonstrative than staying home from the polls.

It is not an option for the fall general election, where the only alternative to a Biden vote for Democrats will be to stay home or vote for Donald Trump.

Given his past record and proposals to exclude Arabs from immigration to the United States, I don’t believe that will be a realistic alternative for many of Michigan’s uncommitted voters.

Michael Traugott, Research Professor at the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The effort was not only joined by Americans of MENA (Middle East and North African) heritage but by youth voters and some members of other minorities.

NPR notes, “As of 2020, there were over 200,000 registered voters in Michigan who identified as Muslim, and over 300,000 Michiganders identify as Middle Eastern or North African, according to data from the U.S. Census.”

Democracy Now! Video: “”Moral Failure”: Democrats Urge Biden to Change Gaza Policy”

Biden’s campaign thought it would be a good idea to put him on Late Night with Seth Meyers, apparently to appeal to the youth vote. Meyers, however, does less well with the youth audience (the “key demographic”) than any of the three late night shows that precede his, helmed by Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.

It was not a pretty picture. Biden thought it would be a good idea to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian refugees from Rafah in preparation for yet another Israel ground operation, planned apparently for April after the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Biden’s main concern with the slaughter of innocents in Gaza seemed to be that it would cost Israel support in Europe and around the world, not that 12,450 children have had their lives snuffed out by what Biden admits has been indiscriminate Israeli bombing. There was no emotion in the man, no drop of the milk of human kindness. He bought the false narrative that this destruction of most of the buildings in Gaza, including schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, community centers, and residential apartment buildings was necessary because Hamas was using civilians as a shield. The rate of death among innocent noncombatants in Gaza has exceeded that of any war fought in this century. The Israeli war plan is that of amoral monsters, which is not surprising given that the corrupt Netanyahu brought full blown fascists into his government.

If a terrorist group was operating in Tel Aviv, would anyone in the US or Europe think the logical response was to destroy Tel Aviv?

Then he again delivered himself of his announcement that he is a Zionist and that without Israel, no Jew in the world would be safe.

There are so many things wrong with this wretched sentiment. First of all, the 6.3 million Jews in the United States ought to be assured of their safety by the President of the United States, not by a foreign country. Second, Israel’s militant policies detract from everyone’s safety, including that of Jews.

But third, if it is true that the world’s 15.7 million Jews need a state to safeguard them, then surely the world’s 14.3 million Palestinians deserve a state to keep them safe. But they don’t have one. Of the 14.3 million, some 6 million in the occupied territories and Lebanon have no citizenship at all — they are stateless, without the right to have rights. Even those with citizenship rights in Israel and Jordan are second-class citizens.

Late Night with Seth Meyers Video: “President Joe Biden Addresses Concerns Over His Age and Shares His 2024 Agenda”

Biden has given billions of dollars to Israel on his theory that it is necessary to the security of Jews, including apparently American Jews. But he has done no more than pay useless lip service to the achievement of a Palestinian state. His State Department’s main project in the Middle East has been to entice Saudi Arabia to join Jared Kushner’s “Abraham Accords,” which completely marginalizes the Palestinians.

In fact, when the Israeli parliament voted last week to never, ever allow a Palestinian state, Biden was completely silent on it.

In its Middle East policy, the Biden administration has been Trump 2.0, from the continuation of the economic and financial blockade on Iran to the “Abraham” scam.

You understand how MENA Americans find it difficult to vote for this. The argument that Trump is worse is true and most of them would admit it. But voting is an intimate, personal, act wrought up in a person’s identity, and you can’t expect people who view someone as a genocidaire to vote for that individual– in their eyes they’d be complicit.

There is an argument that Biden has been an unexpectedly effective domestic president, with good economic performance and advances in green energy. That is also true. But if you’ve lived the Gaza genocide with video on social media for nearly 5 months, it throws those things into the shade. A man who would permit that butchery just isn’t a good man.

Some are already blaming MENA Americans for a potential Biden loss and a return of Trump to the White House. That is ridiculous. Over a third of Americans don’t even bother to vote in presidential elections. In 2020, the World Population Review notes, “the number of eligible voters in the US was over 231 million people. Of these, approximately 168 million registered to vote, and 154 million actually cast a vote in the 2020 presidential election.”

So instead of blaming 4 million Muslim Americans, maybe Democrats should try to get some of those 63 million unregistered Americans registered and bring them, and the 14 million non-voting registered voters to the polls with policies that someone might be enthusiastic about rather than policies that make you want to throw up every morning when you see the news.

(The Conversation) – Dearborn, Michigan, is a center of Arab American cultural, economic, and political life. It’s home to several of the country’s oldest and most influential mosques, the Arab American National Museum, dozens of now-iconic Arab bakeries and restaurants, and a vibrant and essential mix of Arab American service and cultural organizations.

The city became the first Arab-majority city in the U.S. in 2023, with roughly 55% of the city’s 110,000 residents claiming Middle Eastern or North African ancestry on the 2023 census.

One of us is an author and historian who specializes in the Arab and Muslim communities of Detroit, and the other is a criminologist born and raised in Dearborn who conducts research on the experiences and perceptions of Arab Americans. We have paid close attention to the city’s demographic shifts.

To understand Dearborn today, we must start with the city’s past.

Ford and Dearborn are in many ways synonymous

Dearborn owes much of its growth to automotive pioneer Henry Ford, who began building his famous River Rouge Complex in 1917. Migrants from the American South alongside immigrants from European and Arab countries settled Dearborn’s Southend neighborhood to work in the auto plant.

While most early 20th-century Arab immigrants to the United States were Christians, those who moved to Dearborn in the 1920s were mainly Muslims from southern Lebanon.

“Only In Dearborn” | Square Video

Life downwind of the world’s largest industrial complex proved challenging. But the real threat this diverse population faced in the 1950s through the 1970s was from a city-led rezoning campaign designed to turn the Southend over to heavy industry.

Most of the white ethnic groups in the neighborhood had churches and business districts scattered around Detroit, which facilitated their departure from the Southend. But for Arab American Muslims, this community, with its mosques and markets, was indispensable as they began to welcome distant kin from the Middle East after U.S. immigration laws relaxed in the 1960s.

Fleeing civil war in Yemen and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967, these new Arab immigrants breathed new life into Dearborn. In 1973, they filed a class-action lawsuit against the city that eventually saved their neighborhood.

When the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, the Southend again welcomed a new generation of refugees and migrants. By the 1980s, this mix of first- and second-generation Arab Americans had begun to spill into other neighborhoods in East Dearborn. New mosques began opening in the 1980s, and Arab entrepreneurs began investing in neglected commercial corridors.

But Arab Americans frequently faced discrimination in the housing market and in the public schools, which struggled to address the needs of a large cohort of English language learners.

Overcoming discrimination

Tensions came to a head in 1985, when Michael Guido won a mayoral race in which the “Arab problem,” as his described it, pitched the interests of the white working class against new Arab migrants.

Arab American activists responded by pushing for more city services in East Dearborn and running for office. Republican Suzanne Sareini was the first Arab American elected to the City Council in 1990.

But with at-large elections, those with more Arab-sounding names were at a disadvantage. It took another 20 years, when Arabs became the plurality of the population, before other Arab Americans joined Sareini on the council.

Following the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11, Dearborn became a target for anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia, government surveillance, and harassment. The city became a fixation of national media seeking to make sense of its growing Muslim American minority.

Anti-Muslim activists regularly staged Quran-burnings, paraded around ethnic festivals with the heads of pigs on spikes, and threatened to bomb local mosques.

Nevertheless, the Arab American community continued to grow and diversify. Iraqi and Syrian refugee populations began to arrive in the 1990s and 2010s, respectively, following wars in their homelands. They settled in Dearborn and on its periphery in Detroit and neighboring suburbs.

Together, this new cohort of Arab Americans joined the established community in fighting back against president Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban and other policies that discriminated against refugees, migrants and Muslims by building alliances with Democrats and engaging the broadening civil rights coalition, represented by groups such as Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s landmark election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018 as the first Palestinian American woman and one of the first two Muslim American women reflects this growing progressive political base for Arab Americans. Her district includes Dearborn and parts of Detroit and other suburbs.

New leadership

Reflecting the increasing demographic and political clout of the Arab population in Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud became the city’s first Arab American elected mayor in 2021.

Hammoud’s priorities have included creating the city’s first Department of Public Health, introducing Narcan vending machines to address the opioid crisis, fighting for clean air in the Southend, and hosting Ramadan festivities and an Eid al-Fitr breakfast. He’s also shown outspoken support for the LGBTQ+ community.

Hammoud objected publicly to the congressional censure of Tlaib in 2023 following her remarks about the violence in the Gaza Strip. He also called for an unequivocal cease-fire in Gaza at a time when other Democratic leaders were silent.

Dearborn often becomes a topic of global media interest during election years or at times of conflict in the Middle East. That has certainly been true during the ongoing attacks on the Gaza Strip.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an editorial labeling the city as America’s “jihad capital,” which led to public threats against the city that forced Hammoud to increase police patrols.

Public officials, from local leaders to President Joe Biden, have rallied around the city and asked the paper to rescind the editorial and to apologize.

So far, it has not.

The more interesting story about Dearborn, however, is what happens when the national spotlight is turned off. Then, as we have witnessed decade after decade, the city’s residents, Arab and non-Arab, new and old, work to make their home a better, safer, healthier place to raise their families and their voices.

Sally Howell, Professor of History, University of Michigan-Dearborn and Amny Shuraydi, Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Michigan-Dearborn

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.